The race to deliver a COVID-19 vaccine is heating up.
Oxford University’s vaccine candidate has shown good results from their phase 1 human trials. And now, CanSino Biologics Inc.’s experimental coronavirus vaccine’s has shown promising results from their mid-stage clinical study.
The Lancet published the results of the study of the Chinese made CanSino vaccine candidate and found that it was “ safe, and induced significant immune responses in the majority of recipients after a single immunisation.”
What does this mean for the speed at which we can expect a vaccine?
So, the CanSino trial was a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, phase 2 trial for healthy adults aged 18 years or older. In the process of vaccine development, the vaccine candidate is tested in several stages with increasing sample sizes and diverse populations. After pre-clinical studies, phase 1 of human trials is usually carried out on a small sample of healthy individuals to determine the safety of the vaccine.
So far, 26 vaccine candidates worldwide are in the human trials phase. They need to go to at least 3 phases of these on larger samples to completely ensure that the vaccine is safe for the general public.
So while CanSino’s results are hopeful, it is still to early to tell if it will be a viable option as a COVID-19 vaccine.
Interestingly, both the Oxford University vaccine and CanSino are viral vector vaccines. These types of vaccines use a virus to transfer the genes from COVID-19 into healthy cells to provoke an immune response.
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